They’re based in the US, but quite competitive price-wise – I had 250 cards made and shipped for just over $40.

The other nice feature I got from these guys was a UV coating on both sides – it essentially is a near-plastic coating for the card that gives is a bit more weight and a nice smooth finish – makes the card last longer also. There’s pros and cons to this – you can keep them in your wallet and they always look pristine, you can hand them to someone in a bar and after someone spilt beer on them you can just wipe it off and it’s as good as new. The con being of course, that if someone wants to write a note on the flip-side, they’ll need a sharpie to do so!

Looking at my receipt from a couple years ago from these guys, it seems like you can chose to get the UV coating only on one side – I went for both sides though and it worked out just fine for me.

Good luck with everything!
A

You can upload your design directly to their business cards!

Fortunately, the company I’m working at uses firstname.lastname (as well as TLA@example.com, using your “Kürzel”, a [usually three-letter] abbreviation that you use as your login).

gcrumb: Spot color! :-)

This story was told to me by a theatre prof of mine, trying to explain how to deal with the imperfections inherent in any creation.

I suspect that the answer might be more ‘@’ rather than less. If you superimpose the ‘h’ and the ‘l’ over a backgrounded (and faded?) symbol, you can set it apart from the rest of the text, in effect accentuating the difference.

… Or you could just draw your own, as you suggested. 8^)

Almost completely unrelated but I met this woman at the convention I went to recently and we were discussing business cards. Because she works at conventions regularly and there are so many business cards being passed out, she really wanted to stand out so she actually had a card holder made that measures maybe 5×3″. It also opened like a formal card; this way it appears to people that it might actually hold something more, like promotions or free offers, and they’re more likely to hold onto it and check it out once home (especially swag collectors), while it’s also less likely to get lost in a pile of business cards.

Oh, hey, you know what it is? The kerning around the “.” is crap too. I’ll fix both ends.

Pam: I’m really a lowercase sort of guy. The only problem with the descender was in that draft with the blocks of color, though, it’s fine in the final one.

Helvetica was a very specific choice — before I knew anything about what I was doing on the card I knew it was going to be set in Helvetica, and Neue is a nice update to prevent it from looking too retro. I’m not a big fan of humanists for logotype.

(Besides, the only company that can get away with Myriad on a business card right now is Apple. It’s so tightly tied with them right now that it might as well have been commissioned. It ought to be dead to the rest of the world for logotype now, but it’s everywhere anyhow.)